We need to wrest back control over the internet

By Nicholas Stuart

11 September 2018 — 10:00pm

“I can’t believe what we were thinking.” The senior government staffer shook his head. “How we could have been so deluded to actually believe Peter Dutton was the answer; that he could somehow have appealed to voters.” His words trail off into nothingness . . .

The challenge itself was, of course, all Malcolm Turnbull’s own work. If he hadn’t charged into the Liberal party room meeting and fanned the embers of revolt into flame by demanding everyone vote to support him, he’d still be PM today. But funny things happen when small groups of people get together. Locked together in the febrile atmosphere of Parliament House, groups of normally sane people stop listening to logic. They become trapped in alternate realities of their own creation.

Malcolm Turnbull brought about his own downfall.

Photo: AAP

As electorates have grown bigger, politicians have become even more insulated from the public, but it’s not just them. The very skills that first allowed communities to grow around the campfire are now dividing us.

For communities to grow, a way had to be found of keeping society together.

Hierarchies were one of the technologies that developed to allow society to grow larger. It didn’t matter that communities were getting bigger, because small groups of people were still making all the decisions. These leaders could all communicate with one another and so the number of decision makers remained small. Another critical technological development that enabled the expansion of society was the spread of news. This information ensured that everyone could be ‘on the same page’, something especially vital for the development of democracy. Because everyone got a vote, everyone needed to (basically) agree what the problems were. This allowed them to argue about (potential) solutions.

Today, however, the internet has changed all that.

The economic compartmentalisation of society means the community isn’t homogeneous any longer. At one time it was possible to generalise about a ‘typical Australian’ driving a Holden; kids at school; holidaying at Hawks’ Nest. Today the apocryphal ‘swinging voter in a marginal seat’ has vanished; the middle’s evaporated. Instead parties pander to diverse interest groups by cherry-picking appealing policies; only later attempting to bundle them together into some sort of coherent whole, a ‘policy platform’ that supposedly has some broad integrity.

Because of the internet, policies can now be targeted precisely at specific interest groups. The mainstream media’s splintered. With this the communal fireplace, the forum where arguments could be had and agreement was eventually hammered out, has disappeared.

Why bother appealing to the masses when it’s so much easier to identify particular groups that are highly invested in, and concerned about, specific issues. A carefully targeted message can be developed and sent ‘off the radar’ and rarely picked up by conventional media outlets because it’s operating at another level. Shared through so-called ‘social media channels’ such communications pack more of a punch because, firstly, there’s the assumption that ‘friends’ endorse the content and secondly, there’s no balance.

These items might be packaged as news, but they’re compiled to only represent one side of the argument. They reflect a distorted view of reality, where grey has been converted to black and white and all colour is drained from the picture.

Political parties have always played this sort of game, of course. What’s changed now is that other players have also entered the arena and are pushing messages designed, in some cases, to simply sew chaos, foster division, and incite anger. This includes foreign players.

The Department of Finance has, along with ASIO, the Australian Cyber-security Centre, the Australian Electoral Commission and Home Affairs formed an Electoral Integrity Assurance Task Force. This is great. It’s also a reactive and defensive strategy and one lacking teeth. It certainly isn’t enough, by itself, to inspire confidence.

Control information and you shape the future.

Russia and China, for example, are pursuing very different strategies in cyber-space. In the 2016 US election, Russian-linked web traffic sewed division by simply sending increasingly strident messages to both Trump and Clinton supporters. As we now know, such campaigning may have proved critical in assisting Trump win the presidency by boosting his support in a few, critical states, but to some extent that was accidental. Other Russian Morlocks were busy sending out messages supporting Clinton. The only uniting factor was the enthusiasm with which they sewed division. The key point is that the overall message was false.

Interestingly, analysts insist this isn’t the technique that those attacks coming from Chinese sources seem to favour. Their method is more obvious; straight propaganda and silence dissent. This makes it more simple to counter but more dangerous if it takes hold. And, it’s important to note, there are reasons this might occur.

Single out any particular group – such as “Chinese people” – and you catch up everyone that seems to belong, whether they dislike Beijing or have been in the country for decades. This is why simple messages are so dangerous, and yet these are the narratives that flourish in cyberspace. It’s so much easier to create (and accept) a simple 20 word message filled with hate than it is to wade through a complex and qualified, thousand-word opinion piece.

But I’m far from convinced I want Facebook, Google or Twitter to control my news flow, either. Their interests aren’t aligned with mine.